Overview: Thanks to relentless global competition and an unforgiving economy, organizations have been under non-stop pressure to deliver products and services. For many, the lifeblood, and opportunity, has been to mine the data assets being gathered from all corners of their enterprise and beyond? transactions, customer data, employee input, and information about market conditions. However, in the rush to deliver results, many IT and development departments take shortcuts within the testing process, taking live data right out of production environments to run through testing, development and quality assurance (QA) processes. But creating copies of this data exposes organizations to new?and unnecessary?security risks and inefficiencies.

In a new survey of 207 IT and data executives, respondents report their organizations are behind the curve when it comes to managing the risks that could come from exposing live data to less secure settings - including development departments and outside contractors.